On Not Climbing Mountains

by Claire Thomas

From the internationally acclaimed, prize-winning author of The Performance and Fugitive Blue comes a remarkable work of literary fiction

A woman arrives in Geneva, the first stop in a train journey through the country of her father's birth. She yearns to be outside time - untethered and alone - but she soon becomes immersed in the stories resonating all around her.

She visits a museum and stares into the oversized, disco-ball eyes of an insect, unsettled by the intimacy, 'like looking into the facial pores of a lover'. Later, she will tiptoe through the snow to find a portrait of James Baldwin on the window shutter of a chalet, his features rendered in rows of silver staples shot into timber.

She will find traces of Mary Shelley and Fleur Jaeggy; android pioneers in eighteenth-century Neuchâtel; Charlie Chaplin, Patricia Highsmith, and striking workers drilling through the earth to create the vast Gotthard Tunnel; Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary as they summit Everest; Lenin and the Dada artists in early twentieth-century Zurich.

On Not Climbing Mountains is a tender and compelling novel from the internationally acclaimed author of The Performance. Beautifully conceived and deftly crafted, it is an exhilarating feat of storytelling, concerned with the fragilities of the natural world, the pains of grief and memory, and the endless reverberations of art.

'Not climbing, waiting, connecting. Thomas has written a novel that is truly novel - she plays with form and artfully constructs a journey through the mountains of Switzerland, braiding stories of artists, writers, and thinkers into a literary rope, a pulley system for the mind. Vivian Gornick meets Ali Smith, but unmistakably Claire Thomas' MADELEINE GRAY, AUTHOR OF GREEN DOT

Praise for The Performance

'Flawless' WASHINGTON POST

'Compassionate' NEW YORK TIMES

'Quietly transformational' THE TIMES

'Intimate, poignant, and darkly funny' SUNDAY TIMES

'The way Thomas plays with the reader is a sort of genius' THE GUARDIAN

'A near-perfect wind-up music box of a novel . . . Inventive and rule-breaking' ARTSHUB

Praise for Fugitive Blue

'Beautifully done with great imagination' SYDNEY MORNING HERALD

'Immediately enticing' CANBERRA TIMES

'Polished and poignant, expressed with incisiveness and resonance, Fugitive Blue doesn't miss a beat' WESTERLY MAGAZINE

Genres: Literary Fiction, Fiction, Art, Historical, 21st Century

234 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2026

About the author

Claire Thomas is an Australian writer. She has published short stories in various journals, including Meanjin, Island, Overland and Australian Short Stories. She has an Honours degree in English and Art History from the University of Melbourne where she is currently undertaking a PhD. Fugitive Blue is her first novel.

Reviews

[Bianca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored "Performance" by Claire Thomas so I was excited to get my hands on this new offering.

A woman arrives in Geneva, Switzerland, keen to travel through her father's native country. She's grieving his untimely demise.

Through her travels from place to place, we learn titbits about famous writers and artists and scientists: James Baldwin, Charlie Chaplin, Patricia Highsmith, Mary Shelley, the mountaineer Sir Edmund Hillary and many more. She's also fascinated and somewhat obsessed with the works of Jean-Frédéric Schnyder (the cover is one of those). As someone who suffered such afflictions I loved to discover that others - fictional or not - become as infatuated with certain artworks.

Written in vignettes, this masterful novel is to be savoured - which is what I did. Its form, the information titbits, including the few segments about the traveller - appealed to me immensely.

This is a meandering novel, introspective without being navel gazing. It's about grief, memories, art and artists. The lack of resolution and straight forward plot didn't preclude my enjoyment or learning about different Swiss places and certain people who inhabited those places at different times.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think it's commonly accepted that the driver of fiction narrative is binary; it will be either plot or character. It's never occurred to me to question that before, but then along comes Claire Thomas with an entirely different proposition! Well, kind of. Let me explain.

On Not Climbing Mountains does of course contain a semblance of plot, and there is an identifiable main character, with a backstory and even a name (although we don't know it until almost exactly halfway through the book - it's Beatrice Angst). But I would argue that of more importance than either of those things is the structure/framework of the novel, and the way it takes the reader on a journey of discovery.

In fact, right at the start, Beatrice tells us that I have a lofty yearning to be beside the point, outside time, somehow untethered to the measurable. In my view, she (or rather Thomas) achieves that in a really elegant way. Yes, she's in Switzerland to begin to form a connection to her father's country of birth, but the way she does that is by discovering and exploring the lives of other people and characters who have lived or travelled in Switzerland over time. (Not to complicate things further, but a couple of other countries feature as well, and it all makes sense.) Some of the people include writers James Baldwin and Patricia Highsmith, actor Charlie Chaplin, literary figure Heidi and mountain-conqueror Sir Edmund Hillary. At first introduction the person might be referred to only by their first name, making the moment of recognition all the more delightful.

It's clever, it's educative, it's unique and for me it was also quite a restful read. One that I'll most likely return to in the future.

[Jaclyn]

Claire Thomas has written us a novels of ideas and we love her for it. I lived in Switzerland for five years so was always going to love a read that transports me back. But this book is doing a lot more. We encounter writers, visual artists and explorers as our protagonist travels across Switzerland by train. Thomas uses vignettes to give us glimpses and snippets of lives, history, moments to great effect. If you need plot to drive a narrative, this might not be the book for you. But if you’re comfortable to sit and think and observe then the rewards of this book are profound and impactful.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was one of the few who did not enjoy Claire Thomas's previous novel Performance, so I went into this book club choice somewhat reluctantly. The first few pages hinted at the experimental form - vignettes of lives and events around science, art and authors all linked to Switzerland and often to each other - as the protagonist travels through that country by train. Initially I was not engaged. Then, a few vignettes in, I was hooked.
I admired the writing, the structure, the knowledge and research, the clever links, so many layers. A book that would definitely offer even more with re-reading.

[nina.reads.books · Rating 4 out of 5]

On Not Climbing Mountains is the third novel by Australian author Claire Thomas. I read and enjoyed her previous book The Performance and I definitely also enjoyed this book.

This is not a straightforward book though. It was richly literary. Thomas has taken such a unique approach to the writing, peppering the story with thoughts and musings on a huge variety of artists and authors and cultural references. It is set throughout Switzerland and the narrator is taking a pilgrimage of sorts through her father's home country after he has passed away.

On Not Climbing Mountains is not a linear story. It's told in an almost vignette style with each chapter both speaking to the narrator’s journey but also providing commentary on a cultural figure relevant to the location.

One of the blurbs says it braids stories of artists, writers and thinkers into a literary rope, a pulley system for the mind. I honestly can’t think of a more poetic way to describe what Thomas has done here. A wholly unique way to tell a story.

The writing is beautiful, quiet and so layered. In the space between the words the narrator’s grief at the recent death of her father and the loss of her mother as a child is palpable.

Given the limited plot, this won’t be for everyone but I’d recommend giving it a go to experience some very beautiful writing and the opportunity to quietly think about life. I’m feeling a Stella Prize longlisting is potential!

Thank you @hachetteaus for my #gifted copy.

[Malcolm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is this one fiction? It is more a collection of vignettes of various famous people who lived or travelled through Switzerland at periods of time. The main character is not evident through much of the book so doesn’t tie these vignettes together well. She does appear in a bit of detail in the middle of the book which I really enjoyed and was looking forward to knowing her more. That wasn’t to be however. So overall I was disappointed that the current day journey and protagonist could have been so much more.

[Declan Fry]

2026 is being heralded as the year of the physical. Finally! The idea of more face-to-face time couldn’t come sooner. Phone-free experience! Days spent with loved ones! After several centuries of happy physicality, is the algorithm’s brief siren-call gracefully fading?

The narrator of Claire Thomas’s third novel certainly has her fingers crossed. Following the death of her widowed Swiss schoolteacher father in a road accident, Beatrice Angst returns to his homeland. Forbidding herself from her phone, sick of relying upon “digital maps and slick apps”, she travels, like Lucy Honeychurch in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, with a Baedeker travel guide.

Happy to substitute certain technologies for others, Angst treats the Baedeker reverently, enamoured of its print, its status as a “tangible object”. Yet for those of Forster’s era, the Baedeker itself was not so different from the apps of today – a mediated representation of people and locations that placed the impressionable tourist at a remove from the (potentially threatening) flesh-and-blood of life.

Thus the form of On Not Climbing Mountains offers, like a series of gallery installations, its own modes of mediation. Each chapter reflects on artists and figures connected to Switzerland – among them James Baldwin and Charlie Chaplin, Rilke and Patricia Highsmith – via Angst’s narration. Moving back and forth across time and place, Angst relays the details of films, biographies, artworks, histories and written texts as though they were alive and present, providing a kind of analogue to the style of the chapters themselves, each of which the reader wanders through alongside Angst. It is not so much what each chapter means as what it does, creating an experience that the reader, like Angst herself, participates in as an observer, someone who seems to live the experience and yet nonetheless exists at a decided remove from it.

It’s a curious mission: transform mediated experience into something like direct experience. Narrating the work of others becomes a way for Angst, after her father’s passing, to discover “occasional moments of illumination”. Angst’s self-consideration, too, is sometimes filtered through different kinds of media: when she reflects on her childhood and schooling, it is not only via memory but via the scrapbooks and photos she discovers in her father’s study. Angst herself leads a peculiarly solitary existence; we do not learn her name until almost halfway through the book when an uncle addresses her.

Angst confesses “earnestly developing an obsession with literature” at fifteen. Decades later, many of the narratives Angst relays concern youth or childhood: Johanna Spyri’s Heidi; Fleur Jaeggy’s boarding-school novel Sweet Days of Discipline. Yet, Angst’s father is a vague presence, as is her mother. A few weeks before her father’s death, she breaks up with a lover. Single since, she declares herself an “adult orphan” for whom “solitary thinking” is vital. The personal declaration provides context for her introspection, her recurring memories of childhood and personal isolation, many of which are juxtaposed with fears of losing her connection to art, whether in the form of literary achievement (she feels a degree of personal anxiety surrounding artistic longevity), or simply in the desire to find and dedicate herself to a satisfying life of the mind.

Read on:
https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/...

[L · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this more but it was not for me

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mmm maybe 3.5
I loved that now I know a lot of random facts but I feel like the book was just telling me things rather than telling a story?? And yet it I sped through it. Idk still figuring out how I feel

[Rowena Eddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a beautifully written book of meditations on Switzerland. Thomas writes about various authors who lived there for a time, and a series of paintings of station waiting rooms. The protagonist wanders around the country by train to familiarise herself with the country of her father's birth. There is no plot, and no character development. It is an interlude.

[Kate Downey · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up because the prose is crystalline.

Thomas pays attention to the poetics of her sentences so there's a clarity to the images laid down in her carefully chosen words. I like careful writing, I like the gleam of polished work and this is certainly polished. (I was going to say ‘bleached’ but that won’t really work with all the glass and ice metaphors I intend to employ).

Over 75 (let’s call them) episodes, our narrator Beatrice describes her present day travels to Switzerland, her father’s birth country. Beatrice is emotionally adrift (frozen?) and engages with the country primarily on an intellectual and aesthetic level. Using a 1891 14th edition of Baedeker's Switzerland, she navigates the villages of the different Swiss cantons where stories emerge from the histories Beatrice has either researched previously or from the exhibitions and museums she visits.

I really love novels that play with structure. This one follows a series of segments strung along a single thread with links between them; sometimes a memory, an association, sometimes the connection has to be looked for, or inferred, sometimes clever, sometimes tenuous. Between Beatrice’s arrival and departure, Thomas threads a sequence of facts, observations and discoveries about the history of the different towns and their more celebrated inhabitants from writers like James Baldwin, to Mary Shelley, to Elizabeth von Arnim with a cast of poets, painters, biologists, explorers, engineers etc. appearing in the small windows of the book’s volets—miniature worlds which are as informative as they are charming.

I did have some frustration about an absence of earthiness, of life and blood and messiness. And perhaps this is the author's point. By removing feeling, by conjuring remoteness, we do not touch the mountains preferring to keep them in perspective, in our sights, unscaled. Heavy-handed, perhaps, as a metaphor but it does work well for Thomas. That said, I come back to the weight of it, or the lack of weight, of real substance. Much like Beatrice’s wish to remain untethered, I felt this novel could just have floated away up to the lofty peaks for want of grounding matter. A bit like eating snow, insubstantial. And now I am going to ruin that metaphor with the following: I think the remoteness that Thomas conjures makes this a novel of observations, a cabinet of curiosities, if you like, safe in its little glass case in the museum. As such, it stands.

Now back to flesh and blood. There is, in fact, a beating heart. Amongst the rather dreary experiences of our narrator, one episode does resuscitate this otherwise pretty bloodless but very elegant, preserved-in-ice body—and that is Beatrice’s meeting with her uncle Carl, so like her father. Here the text breathes a little, there is a glow, the colour palette turns to yellows and oranges. Here there is connection and warmth. Glaciers could almost melt.

My thanks to Hachette Australia for the uncorrected advance copy.

[Heidi · Rating 4 out of 5]

ON NOT CLIMBING MOUNTAINS is an unusual book. It doesn’t really have a linear plot, or a beginning or end, but rather ambles along like the train journey the main character describes in her travels through Switzerland. We explore not only her father’s country of birth but also the protagonist’s deep seated grief through seemingly unrelated stories she comes across in her travels, each full of symbolism.

I usually prefer books with a clear plot but found this book compelling and fascinating. Through her short chapters, Claire Thomas brings history to life in a way that made me long to find out more – I probably spent as much time looking up historical details and personalities as I spent reading the book. If history had been taught to us like this at school, it would have been my favourite subject! The one thing that stood out to me was the tragedy contained in each snippet – usually a tragic or unexpected death – which resonated with grieving the death of a parent. So whilst we learn very little about the main character’s personal life, she shares a lot with us through her observations and musings. With such an unusual format and so much interesting material, ON NOT CLIMBING MOUNTAINS made for a great bookclub discussion.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

On Not Climbing Mountains stretches the definition of "a novel"- the feel is more like an introspective literary travelogue. Delving into the lives of local cultural figures, our narrator traverses Switzerland dwelling on the death of her father and the work of an artist which has become an obsession to her. Mary Shelley, James Baldwin, Charlie Chaplin, Patricia Highsmith and Heidi are all referenced in very interesting and engaging writing.

This meandering novel is a very different work than Claire Thomas's spectacular Performance and may be a tricky book to recommend but I found myself enjoying the writing and happy to continue reading it.

My thanks to Hachette and NetGalley for an advance review copy.

[Don Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an unusual novel, written from the standpoint of a youngish Australian woman visiting Switzerland, where her recently-dead father was born. Beatrice (Bee) is a teacher, but with much literary leanings, though we do not learn her name until halfway through the book, when she meets her uncle there. This novel has no real plot, just a set of travel experiences, where she narrates past people’s experiences of each town she visits. Mostly these are authors, like Patricia Highsmith, but sometimes artists or other prominent people. Switzerland is a proudly neutral country, so some historical figures are there escaping World Wars.
So, a book to recommend itself to travellers and bookworms.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been eagerly waiting for Claire Thomas to publish a follow up to my beloved Performance. On Not Climbing Mountains is about a woman on holiday in Switzerland, looking at mountains, and thinking about stuff. That's it, that's the whole book!
Even though there is absolutely nothing in this book, it is still strangely compelling. The vignettes about mountainous history are exquisitely written, and somehow I was completely caught up in the writing. I don't know if I recommend this widely, but I absolutely recommend it narrowly.

[Jan Ewing · Rating 5 out of 5]

essays for the mind’s eye

This is a beautifully written series of essays filled with poetic imagery side by side with pragmatic details of a journey through Switzerland, but also through grief, beauty and nostalgia. The author masterfully weaves threads between each essay like a tapestry where you keep seeing new themes and hidden meanings. At the same time, you feel yourself in her shoes as she makes her way from town to town. This book is about mountains and art and literature and family and loneliness and love and so many more things. I loved it.

[Jane Pye · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a slow meditative read, not much narrative and it’s terrific. A young woman travels through Switzerland partly in memory of her Swiss father. She goes to several cantons and describes the artists, writers, history and traditions of the region. For instance she describes the setting and story of Heidi which was an enormous bestseller and goes on to
the lives of alpine farmers. She covers the Gotthardt Tunnel dig in the 1880s without power tools, Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein one wet night at Collogny. I loved it all. Very like WG Sebald in style and subject.

[Toni Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another book reserved through the library thanks to my father and that little random segment on books. Thank you, Dad.

A young woman loses her father and decides to visit his home country of Switzerland. What follows is a stunning amalgamation of discovery, art, understanding, family and grief, among much, much more.

This was beautiful. A little hard to follow at first, but once I got into the flow of it, I started to love it. And as someone who has experienced a fair bit of grief over the past 12 months, it felt like a very welcome book.

Adored it. I want a trophy copy.

[Raynee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A writer returns to her father’s homeland, Switzerland, to explore its hidden histories, mythic landscapes, connect with her own understanding of place and what it means to be an artist.

Beautifully written book of vignettes, untold histories and artful encounters as women attempts to ground herself in a familiar yet foreign land. There is sadness that runs though this, a sense of loss, but it’s beautifully reflective and poignant.

[Chris Giacca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contemplative, but with a specificity of language that leaves you always understanding exactly what emotional phenomena Thomas is describing. I love a novel that leaves you with more knowledge than you began with, and I doubly love a novel that is clear with its world-view, such that you can almost feel the palpating heart of the author through the pages.

A must-read.

[Lisa]

I really liked Fugitive Blue, was not quite so keen on The Performance, and now find myself not getting past page 37 of On Not Climbing Mountains because I've failed to grasp the point of it. It seems like a miscellany of facts, which have failed to engage me. Perhaps there are riches in store, but I don't have the patience to find out.
I don't rate books I don't finish.

[Lauren Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh gosh this was such an interesting book! I adored the intersection of grief and facts split into different sections focusing on different mountains. There was something truly comforting as each story because connected to another. It really felt like a warm hug.

[Naomi Dobroff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved every single word. I didn’t want it to end so I took my time and savoured the stories, connections, art and authors and, of course, our woman traveler, wrapped in grief and her journey.
I feel I’ll read it many times as I will discover even more each time.
Beautiful.

[Tess Carrad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did enjoy reading this rather strange book. No plot. But instead you get lots of snippets. Little bits of information and descriptions. There are some "autobiographical" sections. And they are all lightly linked together but like a web. I do like trivia.

[Andrew Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece.
Astonishingly and achingly beautiful threads that interweave with such craft.
Bravo and thank you to an incredible author.

[Tamara Preuss · Rating 4 out of 5]

This didn’t feel like a novel but I did enjoy the sprawling physical journey through Swiss towns woven with a historical journey through famous figures’ associations with Switzerland.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actually 3.5

[Rickey]

A sticker on the library book covered the "not" on this title completely and I love climbing mountains. There was not enough of a hook for me to keep reading a title I was unluckily misled by.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and well written

[Dom :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This acceptance might be a sort of admirable wisdom.”